How Crumbly Thickets Began ...

... with a Memory, a Lemon, and a Warning

The world of Crumbly Thickets grew out of childhood memories of blackberry‑picking, fascinating stories, baking cakes and wandering through the fields in the England of the 1960s and 70s.

Years later, those memories began to feel fragile — as though the simple traditions, joys and securities of childhood were being destroyed by mass production, consumerism, accelerating technology, the pressures of a changing climate — and by the spread of systems that forget what it means to be human.

Then one ordinary day, while baking in the kitchen, a simple lemon became the beginning of a new revelation. Bright, fragrant, full of life — a reminder that beauty and wonder still exist in small things, even as the world grows colder, less personal, and increasingly disconnected from the things that make us feel rooted.

That moment sparked the first ideas that would become The Hidden Stories of Crumbly Thickets. At its heart, this story is about protecting what matters: childhood, imagination, nature, home, community — and the hidden magic of ordinary life — in a world that risks losing them altogether.